I have a problem-ish.
I say -ish because I know and acknowledge that it is a problem, but I don’t particularly feel the urgency to fix it.
First things first, I have anxiety. (no way!! you have anxiety?? i know, i k n o w)
I also majored in Film, TV and Multimedia in university, so you’d really expect me to know and enjoy the deep cut stuff but I… I like animated tv shows and New Girl.
I grew up watching the Disney channel and Cartoon Network - I still remember the morning cartoons that my mum would let me watch while she wrangled my hair into two bubble braids. From Sagwa The Chinese Siamese Cat and Kim Possible to Courage the Cowardly Dog, I ate up most animated shows as a child.
In true older-gen-Z-on-tumblr fashion, I had a hyper-fixation on Adventure Time and Gravity Falls as a teen, which probably accounts to why I self taught myself animation when my film degree offered three (3) classes during my entire 4 years there.
I watched a couple of episodes of Bob’s Burgers on a pirating website at age 13, and instantly fell in love with it.
Unfortunately, all the episodes were out of order and it drove me to bits. I also had too much homework to do, so I decided to promptly forget about it.
Until one fateful day in the 2020s, when South Korean Disney+ decided to upload all. the. seasons.
And since then, I’ve been whipping it out whenever I’m in need of a comforting lull and laugh.
This is my Current Comfort Show Rota.
Bob’s Burgers (Always.)
New Girl
Simpsons (This is new! I recently found that it gets me completely zoned in on whatever work I’m doing in the moment. It’s insane.)
The Good Place (I could write a series of essays about this show and its subsequent rewiring of my brain chemistry.)
Modern Family
(note: the bolded titles are the ones I realistically keep in rotation at all times.)
What is it that I look for in a comfort show, you may ask. The answer is simple!
I want a low-risk (no main character deaths, The Good Place excluded), friendship central ensemble cast with a balance of silly goofery and feel-good stories. I can’t do secondhand embarrassment - which is why I steadfastly avoid The Office (sorry, sorry, I just can’t watch past the first episode) - and I can’t do rage inducing characters like Ross Geller. (Or Rory Gilmore. SORRY I do like Gilmore Girls but that girl makes really poor choices!!)
![Overview Overview](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fba8c4c95-66c4-47da-aafe-4fefdc4e292b_940x545.jpeg)
Or, on the other side of the spectrum, I just need shows that provide background noise to my day-to-day life. Shows like The Simpsons or Family Guy aren’t the most complex stories, nor is it particularly feel-good. But pop culture centric, absurdist comedy makes for excellent life-shows, i.e., cleaning, cooking, brushing your teeth, spacing out in bed time shows.
There’s just something so synergetic about having on a fresh oversized t-shirt with ratty pajama shorts from when you were 14, one foot out of the covers whilst listening to the murmuring dialogue of a comfort show that gets me sleeping.
With all the goods and joys of a good comfort show out of the way, I do feel the need to talk about my inability to start and enjoy something new.
I’ve gotten better at actually watching new things now. I actually make a point to watch new things, for the purpose of keeping up with the industry that I love and would like to work in some day. I love writers, I love writing, I love art direction and cinematography and the sheer effort that goes in to creating something like a whole freaking TV show.
But the experience feels disrupted sometimes because I’m so wrecked by my anxiety.
Anxiety that something will happen that will emotionally throw me off-kilter. Anxiety that I’ll, god forbid, form an attachment to a character, only for them to die off.
As I write this, I do understand how ridiculous it seems to feel so anxious about something as objectively banal as watching a show. And you might think that I’m just especially invested in fictional characters and their fictional plights.
And maybe I project myself upon these characters a little too much. It’s a habit from when I was younger - I struggled to relate to the people around me but I could always relate to the characters I read in my books. (coughcough hermionegranger coughcough)
But science backs me up on my brain’s struggles!
We’ve all experienced a heavier cognitive load over the past few years. The decisions we had to make were potentially risky, increasingly difficult and crucial to our health. The amount of new information we had to process in those unprecedented times depleted our working memory more than it already did, and simply put, we were exhausted.
Watching something new when your brain can’t physically handle any more thinking is practically impossible. And watching a TV show that we are familiar with has shown to energise and restore our feelings of self-control after a period of assiduity and exertion, which is why we prefer to rewatch a show when feeling especially depleted.
As Jennifer Fayard writes:
While new experiences can be exciting, they can also be stressful. Research continually provides support for something called the mere exposure effect. Basically, the more times we have been exposed to something, the more we tend to like it later on. This happens because experiencing something previously increases something called perceptual fluency, or the ease with which we can process information, in subsequent experiences. When something is easy to process, it tends to make us feel positive emotions, which in turn make us like the object more.
That means when I watch New Girl for the fourth time and know exactly what’s coming, my brain has to do zero work to figure out what’s going on. And my brain, just like yours (and everyone else’s for that matter), is lazy, and having to do no thinking whatsoever makes it happy.
(Jennifer, you and I are two peas in a pod.)
As I tackle my real-life anxiety, I find that my comfort shows are a safety blanket of sorts for me to seek asylum in.
The pandemic destroyed whatever semblance of normalcy in my life.
I was just about to turn 20, I was confused about my place in the world and felt the most directionless I’d ever felt in my life.
But in these shows, I saw peace. I saw regular anxieties and problems that were processed and overcome. I saw familiarity and nostalgia that I desperately wanted it back in my life. It made me feel safe, and known.
I wanted life to feel as it looked on these shows, difficulties and all.
So as much as I wait to outgrow these shows as I outgrow and overcome my own anxieties in life, I feel good in knowing that I’ll always have them in my roster for me to fall back on when the world feels especially unfamiliar.
With that being said, I’ll watch an episode of Reservation Dogs before I go back to my Bob’s Burger episodes. I’ve been meaning to watch it for ages.
See you next Sunday,
Kim x